Have You Seen This? The magic of 4 hands on 1 guitar

THE STAGE — Honing a musical craft takes a lot of time, practice, and patience.

When you add other musicians to the mix, by necessity, you need to add layers of relationship management, musical timing, and a whole lot of trust to the mix to make it work. And it can work in that scenario because each musician has their own instruments, job, and spot on the stage to play.

Then you have a guitar duo like Siqueira Lima who take it to a whole new level with an incredible classical guitar arrangement that requires four hands on one guitar.

In the video, it’s sweet to see Uruguayan-born Cecilia Siqueira and Brazilian-born Fernando de Lima get trusting and cozy as they play, but the real mind-blowing aspect of the performance is the actual skill and involved in playing.

You might assume that one part of the duo would take the bass line and one the treble melody then concentrate on their own parts. But that’s now how their rendition of “Tico Tico no Fubá” by Brazilian composer Zequinha de Abreu goes.

Sure, sometimes they stick to the assumed bass-treble separation. But if you really pay attention, you can see them smoothly shifting to playing in different clefts with each hand. And if you don’t want to pay attention, there is one part where that is absolutely clear.

After you’ve lived through the awe that is their fingerwork, I encourage you to watch again and pay attention to the waves of pure fun and joy that cross Siqueira’s face as she effortlessly trips through difficult passages.

The particular performance is certainly a popular part of Siqueira Lima’s repertoire, but the vast majority of their partnership consists of duets on two guitars. And it has to be this way because each of them is an incredibly practiced and gifted musician in their own right. In fact, the duo met when they tied for first at II International Guitar Contest Pró-Música/SESC in 2001.

This particular performance of “Tico Tico no Fubá” was posted two years ago, but when you come across something this spectacular, you have to post it. To see more from Siqueira Lima, you can visit their website here.

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About the Author: Martha Ostergar

Martha Ostergar is a writer who delights in the ridiculous that internet serves up, which means she's more than grateful that she gets to cruise the web for amazing videos to write about. Follow her on Twitter @monstergar.